Université de Tours

Philippe Prévost, Laurie Tuller, Sandrine Ferré, Christophe dos Santos, Racha Zebib

Prévost and Tuller are both full professors at the Linguistics Department and members of the Autism Team of Research Unit INSERM 930. Prévost has worked on the role of computational complexity (e.g., object clitics and wh-questions) in language acquisition, including SLI and ASD, via different experimental methods, including eye-tracking. Tuller has contributed to work on the identification of clinical markers of language impairment in French via comparative study of developmental pathologies (autism, SLI, mild-to-moderate hearing loss, epilepsy), showing how complex syntax is avoided in the different populations. Prévost and Tuller’s team has published in A-journals such as Language Acquisition, Second Language Research, Lingua, and Applied Psycholinguistics. Tuller and Prévost have collaborated within several research projects, including an ANR project on bilingual language acquisition (2008-2011; 115 000 €), and a COST Action on SLI and bilingualism (2009-2012). Tuller is currently PI of an ANR/DFG project (176 877 €) on the identification of SLI in bilingual children, of which Prévost is a member.
Prévost, Tuller and colleagues investigate the nature and development of language abilities, across the whole autism spectrum, in children and adults with ASD, via standardized and experimental measures of morphosyntax, nonverbal reasoning, executive functions, and pragmatics. Prévost and Tuller also recently started co-supervising a PhD thesis on bilingual children with ASD. It is these phenomena and autism populations that the Tours lab focuses on within the LACA network collaboration.